Strange Politics

Roger Cohen has a snappy take on the somewhat wild turn in our politics that has come to favor the outliers, the extremist-sounding candidates, such as Trump in America or Jeremy Corbyn in England.

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This is a season of radical discontent. People believe the system is rigged. They have good reason. Rigged to favor the super-rich, rigged to accentuate inequality, rigged to hide huge increases in the cost of living, rigged to buy elections, rigged to put off retirement, rigged to eviscerate pensions, rigged to export jobs, rigged to sabotage equal opportunity, rigged to hurt the middle class and minorities and the poor. Increasingly unequal societies have spawned anger, an unsurprising development. The anger is diffuse, in search of somebody to articulate it, preferably in short declarative sentences.

-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times

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Happiness

“Pleasure comes from alternating between work and rest, hardship and comfort, pleasure and pain. There is no happiness in constant satisfaction.”

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (?)